Wikimedia Foundation highlights

The new mobile editing interface

Mobile editing

This month, the mobile web team released new navigation features for contributors to all Wikimedia mobile sites, including the existing upload and watchlist star features, as well as an edit button. This means that editing (in the form of section-level markup editing) is now enabled on all mobile Wikimedia sites for logged-in users. The users of our "beta" channel will soon see redesigned mobile notifications, as well as guides for first-time editors and uploaders. (More about the beta channel and how you can opt in.)

Wikipedia Zero comes to India

The first Wikipedia Zero launch in India gives 60 million mobile phone subscribers free-of-charge access to Wikipedia on their mobile phones. The promotional campaign around this launch, led by our partner Aircel, received broad coverage in print and was accompanied by Twitter and blogging events. Aircel customers now have free access to Wikipedia in English, as well as to the 19 Indic language Wikipedias.

VisualEditor beta launch

In July we enabled the new editing interface on several Wikipedias as the default editor, first for logged-in editors and then for anonymous users as well. This resulted in a great deal of feedback, and the team responded with several hundred improvements to fix urgent issues. In addition, the team deployed user interface improvements, most notably to the references insertion dialog. Currently, users are making approximately 800 edits per hour using the VisualEditor on Wikimedia sites.

There are continuing discussions with different language communities about the positioning of the VisualEditor beta in the user interface and appropriate notices indicating its beta status. The Wikimedia Foundation is using the beta period to collect and analyze bug reports, feature enhancements, and data, to observe actual user behavior, and to improve the editing experience continuously. Our eventual objective is for VisualEditor to be the default editor for all Wikipedia users, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the wikitext editor.

Other movement highlights

Winners of "Wiki Loves Public Art" announced

At the end of July, the winners of Wiki Loves Public Art were announced. Similar to Wiki Loves Monuments, "Wiki Loves Public Art" is an international contest to take photos of artworks that are accessible to the public. It took place for the first time this year, in Austria, Finland, Israel, Spain (Barcelona) and Sweden. 225 participants uploaded more than 9,250 images.

Ana Toni (2009)

New Board of Trustees member: Ana Toni

Ana Toni was appointed to the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees in July for a two-year term. Toni is the CEO of a consultancy firm based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which works on social and environmental issues. She serves as the chair of Greenpeace International, and previously worked in leading positions for the Ford Foundation and ActionAid.

Buenos Aires edit-a-thon in former military prison

On July 20, a "Memorial Edit-a-thon" was held in Buenos Aires, at ESMA, a former "black site" (illegal military prison) during the Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, and today a human-rights museum. Besides experienced and new Wikipedia editors, it was also attended by survivors of the black site. The Argentine Wikimedia chapter interviewed one of the attendees, a photographer who dedicated most of her career to political activism and owns an archive of 45,000 photographs that she intends to upload to Wikimedia Commons after digitization.